Why Is My Legal Blog / Website Losing Traffic?

You decided you should blog. Maybe you also set up a static website and created several static pages of content. Perhaps you signed up for some sketchy law firm SEO. You started to get some “hits” from search engines. Maybe you even attracted some potential clients. Things seemed to be going swimmingly. Then something happened. Almost overnight, your traffic from Google tanked. What the heck happened?

Panda Update

We first heard about the update that would eventually be named ‘Panda’ (named after a Google engineer) back in Feb. 2011 when Google announced it had found a new way to find more high-quality sites in search.

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

If you’re really interested in learning the gory details about Panda, I recommend you go here, here and here.

In a nutshell, Panda was designed to reward sites that publish high-quality original content and penalize sites that publish “thin content” or lots of low-quality, keyword stuffed articles that offered little to no real value for the reader.

One of the interesting consequences of Panda is that sites that didn’t necessarily intentionally manipulate search results may still find that they lost traffic due to publishing content that just isn’t very good.

Penguin Update

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

The bottom-line is that if you violate Google’s quality guidelines, you’re at risk of losing positions and traffic as a result of Penguin. That’s not fear-mongering, that’s a fact.

One of the most common violations of the quality guidelines is paying for inclusion in various link schemes:

Site-wide links are typically links found in a footer or header of a website that appears on every page on the website. These links are considered untrustworthy by Google since these are typically from company-owned domains (not a true third-party referral) or paid link relationships. Matt Cutts adds, “We’ve done a good job of ignoring boilerplate, site wide links. In the last few months, we’ve been trying to make the point that not only is link buying like that not doing any good, we’re turning the dial up to let people know that certain link spam techniques are a waste of money.”

What can I do now?

If you believe that your blog and/or website has been negatively impacted by an algorithm update, the first step is to calm down. Too many site owners are delirious with Panguinoia.

Before doing anything, you need to diagnose the reason for your site’s ranking and traffic drop. The easiest way to discover if your rankings fell as a result of Google Penguin is to analyze your website’s traffic data. If your rankings (and traffic) took a noticeable dive on or around April 24, 2012, there’s a good chance it’s got something to do with Google Penguin. To get started, be sure to isolate your traffic data solely for Google organic search traffic, since this is the traffic source that Penguin would have impacted.

If you’re confident that you’ve suffered from one of these updates, the next step is to stop doing what the updates are designed to filter: thin content & violations of quality guidelines.

Getting back into Google’s good graces can be tough. Sure, you can try to clean up your back link profile and submit a reconsideration request. But you’ll face several challenges. First, if you’ve hit the black hat linking pretty hard, you’ll find that getting responses from spam sites that are linking to yours is an act of futility. Second, even if you’re able to contact them and convince them to remove the links, you’ve lost the inflated authority you had prior to the update. Your new traffic is just the new normal for your site.

Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

Have you noticed a large drop in search traffic overnight? Were you engaged in link schemes? Were you churning out (or outsourcing) short-form blog posts without any original information or analysis? What was the result?

Gyi Tsakalakis helps lawyers earn meaningful attention online because that's where clients are looking. He tends to write about legal marketing technology. He misses coaching football and is happy to discuss various strategies and techniques of defensive front seven play.

4 responses to “Why Is My Legal Blog / Website Losing Traffic?”

This is likely of little comfort to firms that experienced drops as a result of Panda / Penguin and are currently experiencing “Panguinoia” (great term BTW), but those firms that follow and observe Google’s webmaster guidelines may have seen an uptick in traffic driven by Google.

Once lawyers decide to “play by the guidelines”, they can take some solace in the reasonable belief that they will, hopefully, only receive more and more traffic from Google as Google develops its algorithm(s).

Great article! I find it very interesting that firms are scrambling to ‘fix’ traffic using the same methods that got them in trouble in the 1st place. SEO is a turtle’s race – slow and steady. There are no shortcuts. Several of our clients’ organic impressions more than tripled (according to WMT) in April 2012, and traffic has increased about 5-10% per month for 18 months straight. I am only mentioning this because we have done very little SEO beyond ‘technical’ stuff…and NO link building what-so-ever. Mainly data compilation and research. A testament to the spot-on accuracy of this article. Nice job.

Glad to hear others preaching to do it right from the beginning. One of the pushbacks I have heard is that it is ‘harder’ now. However, my response is that it shouldn’t be easy – there are only 10 slots or so on the first page so there is competition. And if you do it RIGHT it is easier to stay on top and it is then even Harder for others not willing to spend the time and energy to do it right. We talk about this very topic in the same way in some CLEs on tech tips we do and we still had the occasional person come up afterwards looking for the latest ‘trick’ to get to the first page fast. As Jason said above – Slow and Steady wins.

The newest Google change surfaced a few days ago and has hit the keyword rich URL sites fairly hard. In effect, for while, Google preferred sites that had keywords in the URL and for that reason many incorporated that into their marketing strategy. With this recent change, newer sites with key word rich URLs have been substantially penalized and many don’t appear in the first few pages of Google. The more the story is that Google is constantly evolving trying to get the most relevant content in front of their viewers. The balance for Google will be the paid advertising which seems to be dominating more and more of their current pages. it is a fine line between the most relevant content and ad revenue for Google.